Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Directors

The low-budget comedy “Chooch,” which was released to little acclaim and little business in 2004, has been at the center of political news in the last few weeks. In March, it was revealed that Hank Morris, the former state comptroller Alan Hevesi’s former consultant, had put money into the film (which was produced by the deputy comptroller David Loglisci’s brothers), and had elicited funds for it from (according to the New York Daily News) Barret Wissman, of Hunt Financial Ventures, which, soon thereafter, “won $116 million in pension fund business.”

Now it is widely reported (as in the Wall Street Journal) that, in 2005, while seeking (successfully) to do business with the state pension funds, Steven Rattner, of the investment firm Quadrangle (and President Obama’s nominee to oversee the auto-industry bailouts), arranged to have a Quadrangle subsidiary distribute the DVD. That company, GT Brands, paid about $89,000 for the rights, despite the fact that the movie made barely $30,000 at the box office.

But scandal is one thing, cinema another; and I’m interested in the colorful characters—Joey Summa, Carmine Famiglietti, and Gino Cafarelli—who actually made the movie. In 2004, Dan Barry profiled them for the New York Times:

They got their start by presenting an “interactive murder mystery” at a Catskills resort in 1992. During auditions they asked a young actor from Staten Island, son of a custodian and a bookkeeper, to drink poison and die. “You died,” Gino tells Joey, now 34. “Man, you died.”

Summa and Famiglietti wrote a song, “HaYa Doin’,” which, according to Barry, the Yankees used “as a motivational anthem”; then, inspired by their old-Italian neighborhood in Flushing, decided to make a movie, in which (according to IMDB), Dino Condito, a guy from Queens, screws up in a softball game and goes to Mexico with his cousin, where a series of adventures (including an exploding chicken coop) end happily.

For the record, according to Barry, “chooch” is

a term derived from the Italian word for donkey. Roughly translated, it means lovable screw-up. “You know who was a chooch?” Gino asks. “Ralph Kramden.”

Ah, but Mr. Marshall never had trouble with the SEC for investing in Kran-Mar’s Mystery Appetizer.

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